New Skype for Business 2016 look and feel coming your way…

The user interface on the Skype for Business 2016 C2R (click to run) client will have some changed visual elements. Some of the examples of these changes are:

On the main window, you’ll notice the new look to the following elements:

When you hover over a contact’s photo, you’ll notice the modality icons have changed as well:

When you open a conversation window, you’ll notice several changes:

Why is this happening?

The new client visuals are part of a large amount of work (both visual and internal) Microsoft has done to make Skype for Business 2016 more accessible so that it can be enjoyed by more people around the world. One example of this effort is the slight variation in color changes which provides greater text-to-background contrast to empower those with low vision to more easily distinguish parts of the interface. We also improved screen reader support, simplified keyboard navigation and made the keyboard focus easier to see in many places. For more information on the overall goal of Microsoft to enable all users go to: https://www.microsoft.com/enable/

When will this happen?

All dates are an estimate and subject to change.

Early Adopters on the Current Channel and First Release for Deferred channel will see these changes in early November, 2016, whereas organization members on the Deferred Channel will see these changes in February, 2017.

Anyone else noticed that the visual update appeared to be rolled to Current channel in build 7369.2054, but then just 8 days (and two point builds later) it got removed again? Rolling back to either build 7369.2054 or 7369.2055 gets the new UI, but 7466.2038 reverts it.

@Matthias: I guess cosmetic GUI changes can be sold easier to internal MSFT mgmt as “improvement” rather than deep low-level -and actually requested by end customers- enhancements, that will “just” result in the product being working “better”.